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With systemd having the most commits ever in 2015 for this project, I was curious to see how the statistics for 2016 compared... To some surprise, the number of commits to systemd fell sharply and the code churn is also down to a point not seen in a few years.

We have already covered some of the interesting talks from this year's systemd conference including how to use it for application sandboxing, a new wireless daemon coming to replace wpa_supplicant, and BUS1 is on the way. But saving the best for last in another presentation to watch this weekend for those interested in systemd: Lennart Poettering's state of the union address for systemd and a look ahead to 2017 features.

In addition to the BUS1 presentation, also exciting from the systemd.conf 2016 conference is a thorough walkthrough of a new wireless daemon for Linux being developed by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center.

Landing over night in systemd Git were several new tunables for offering better system security/protection. The systemd-udevd.service is also now run in a Seccomp-based sandbox to prohibit any network access.

Systemd 230 was released just last week and it has taken heat not only for opening up FBDEV to potential security issues, which already reverted, but also for changing the default behavior of user processes.

Last week's release of systemd 230 ended up shipping with a change that made it more easy for processes running as a user to snoop on frame-buffer devices. That change has already been reverted for the next systemd update.

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